I might post an odd review here but I will not return ratings or reply to communications. Feel free ...
I might post an odd review here but I will not return ratings or reply to communications. Feel free to contact me through dooyoo, Helium or igougo - or directly on magdadh@hotmail.com
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Summary: beautifully written internal-monologue tale of bodily anguish
It's not difficult to see why Anne Enright's "The Gathering" has been short-listed (and eventually, selected) for that ultimate literary fiction accolade, the Man Booker prize. If our (or the jurors') idea of the the peaks of literary novel is, almost unavoidably, defined by the Great Moderns, if it's all of Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence; Proust and Kafka; then "The Gathering" had to be recognised because it's steeped in that tradition.
Veronica Hegarty, one of the twelve Hegarty siblings is bringing her brother Liam home to bury. He walked to his death in the Brighton sea, his brain muddled by drink, his pockets filled with stones. The gathering of the title refers to the family coming to the funeral in Dublin, but most of the book consists of Veronica's reminiscences and imaginings before that, while she sorts out the transport and the funeral arrangements.
Veronica is telling (or trying to tell) her family's history over the last 80 or so years, and by doing that she's hoping to find answers, find explanations, find solutions - ostensibly to the conundrum of Liam's death - but ultimately, she's searching for some kind closure to her own anguish. She thinks she has an explanation: one in tune with our popular, current, early-21st century understandings of what causes people to become maladjusted, and she latches onto this explanation, choosing it as the focal point of her story, clinging to it desperately: one period when, during her mother's depression, she and her brother lived with their grandmother and he was - possibly, probably, likely, undoubtedly? - 'interfered with' by a family acquaintance.
Ostensibly, an account of the death of a particularly dysfunctional member of a dysfunctional family, "The Gathering" is not Liam's tale, it's not a family story (though it's a story about family), not even a 'sexual history' as it's claimed in the promo blurb. It's Veronica's tale, and a disturbing and an almost unrelentingly grim one it is. Not just because Veronica has crossed the line between some kind of normality and some kind of a nervous breakdown: her marriage dissolving into a silent scream of hate and alienation, Veronica "not believeing in her husband's body anymore"; her drinking barely under control, her sleep out of kilter, she roams the house at night trying to work out "why are they so fucked up, and why are they so much there", remembering and imagining, imagining and remembering.
It is - of course - a very well written book, with a strong, penetrating voice and profoundly visceral insights, written in something akin to a very vivid stream of conciousness. There is a physical quality to the writing that wonderfully mirrors Veronica's obsessive concentration on the bodily in general, and on the sexual in particular - we never learn why, but the figure of the mother, who bore 12 children (and miscarried 7 more), "passive and sweet and vague", and in some way monstrously sexual in this vague passivity - has to have something to do with it.
On a charitable reading, one could say that "The Gathering" is about what all great novels are: about loss and death, and sex and love; about family, "those people you never chose to love but love all the same" but to me it lacked universality. Gazing into Veronica's mind was somehow repulsively fascinating, but the content remained particular to her. Crisis situations and life events (including wedding and funerals) are frequently used as a focus for presenting a concentrated snapshot of a social landscape, but "The Gathering" didn't make this leap: the landscape is purely emotional, and the people and ghosts that populate Veronica's mind have no life of their own, and the sex and love and even death are also her peculiar versions. She's so full of angst, regret and resentment that she's not capable of telling me anything new about love and death, and she tells me very little that I could read as a shared experience and ultimately leaves me cold and quite happy to let her go, in an ending that is ironic and a little bit more uplifting than the rest of the book, to navel-gaze in her own private world.
Three personal stars for (mine, perhaps) inability to connect, and four general stars as it's - more objectively - a very good piece of writing. Not, I hasten to say, one for people who demand that something actually happens in their novels or who like to like their narrators, but for the sheer quality of the work, cautiously recommended for readers of literary fiction.
277 pages Jonathan Cape hardback, around £6.50 on Amazon
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